After intense rivalry, the women have created an exciting gay boom on screen

It may well have been expected that there would be a positive response from this fan base, but what was more surprising to some was the show’s other core demographic: women, specifically straight women. From Cosmopolitan to NPR, many media outlets have wondered why the show’s male sex scenes make the women so sexy under the collar. However, this shouldn’t be surprising at all – given the long history of women dealing with this kind of material, on the page if not on the screen.

History of the phenomenon

Since the 1960s, it is well documented that male romance and erotica have provided female audiences with fantasy fuel. One notable case of this was when female fans of the then-new science fiction series Star Trek began imagining something happening between Captain Kirk and Spock. They wrote their own complex stories in which these two characters were lovers, creating what also became known as “slash” fanfiction, a specific type of fan fiction that brought together characters of the same sex.

In a pre-internet world, it’s hard to imagine how this very specific group of fans with unusual fantasies could have connected, but they found a way, explains Lucy Neville, the 2018 author of Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica. “I interviewed a lot of women who were into fantasy in the 1960s,” she says. “And it was all about the zines. They would take them with them to fan events and then try to learn about the other ‘outtakes’. They would form little subgroups, and they would all exchange their zines and read each other’s stories. So it was very grassroots and organic.” However, the arrival of the Internet in the 1990s provided fans with a more fertile space to create entire parallel romantic and sexual stories around characters on television.

The world of publishing and literature also has a long history of women creating and enjoying male-to-male romances. In Japan in the 1970s, a community of female artists known as the Year 24 Group began creating what was known as shojo manga—Japanese comics aimed at girls, which sometimes explored same-sex male relationships. In the 1980s and 1990s, this evolved into the yaoi or boys’ love scene, which focused exclusively on stories of male/male sexual relationships, usually written by women.